Throwing Stones at Jews is based in Ancient
Islamic Ritual

During
the Hajj pilgrimage there is a ritual in which pilgrims stone a pillar
symbolising the devil near the holy city of Mecca.

Islamic sermons repeatedly emphasize the
connection between the Jews and Satan. What is the proper way to
deal with an insolent Jew? To throw stones.

Dr. Abdul Halim Mahmoud, rector of Cairo’s
al-Ashar University, theologically and politically the most influential
university in Islamdom: “Allah commands Moslems to fight the friends of
Satan wherever they are to be found. Among the friends of Satan—indeed,
among the foremost friends of Satan in the present age—are the Jews.”1

Just after the turn of the present century,
the British vice-consul in Mosul wrote a report that illustrated the nature
of the "traditional relationship" between Muslim and Jew in a less volatile
moment:

The attitude of the Moslems toward
the Christians and Jews, to whom as stated above, they are in a majority
of ten to one, is that of a master towards slaves whom he treats with a
certain lordly tolerance so long as they keep their place. Any sign of
pretension to equality is promptly repressed. It is often noticed in the
streets that almost any Christian submissively makes way even for a Moslem
child. Only a few days ago the writer saw two respectable looking, middle-aged
Jews walking in a garden. A small Moslem boy, who could not have been more
than 8 years old, passed by and, as he did so, picked up a large stone
and threw it at them -- and then another -- with the utmost nonchalance,
just as a small boy elsewhere might aim at a dog or bird. The Jews stopped
and avoided the aim, which was a good one, but made no further protest.2

Perhaps the definitive historian on the North
African Jews, H. Z. Hirschberg, notes that in fifteenth-century Tunis,
several Jews held "positions of honor." To a Western-oriented reader, the
"position of honor" would indicate freedom from persecution. Yet an authenticated
and respected document of that period, written by a visiting Flemish nobleman,
describes Tunisian Jews as "despised and hated." After noting the privileged
positions of local Christians, the nobleman wrote:

The Jews, on the other hand, have
no freedom. They must all pay a heavy ... tax. They wear special clothes,
different from those of the Moors. If they did not do so, they would be
stoned, and they therefore put a yellow cloth on their heads or necks;
their women dare not even wear shoes. They are much despised and hated,
more than even the Latin Christians....3

A teacher was sent from Beirut in 1910 to
assess the constant reports of travail for the Yemenite Jews. He noted
that, after

more than a week, I have made
myself acquainted with the life of the Jews in all its phases.... They
are exceedingly unfortunate.... If they are abused, they listen in silence
as though they had not understood; if they are attacked by an Arab boy
with stones, they flee...4

According to nineteenth-century historians,
some Jewish families in Aleppo -which, like Alexandria, was an atypically
tolerant cosmopolitan center of international commerce -- were affluent
and relatively safe. Others, even in Aleppo, who were less well-connected
were "subject to violence and oppression from various quarters.".5
Money was extorted by officials on every pretext, petty bullying was commonplace,
and one Jew reported that "When a Jew walked among them [the Muslims] in
the market, one would throw a stone at him in order to kill him, another
would pull his beard and a third his ear lock, yet another spit on his
face and he became a symbol of abuse."".6

2.Lewis,
Islam in History, p. 319, n. 9. Lewis gives an illustration of the "traditional
relationship" between Muslim and Jew from a report by H.E. Wilkie Young,
the British Vice-Consul in Mosul, written January 1909, Middle Eastern
Studies, vii (1971), p. 232.